All these lessons are clear from “Empire State of Mind:
How Jay-Z Went From Street Corner to Corner Office” by Zack
O’Malley Greenburg (Portfolio, $25.95), one of the year’s best
rock books.

The performer, whose real name is Shawn Carter, started as
a Brooklyn kid who shot his brother in the shoulder for stealing
his jewelry. He then tried selling crack cocaine. He missed few
street-smart tricks on his way to a fortune estimated by Forbes
at $450 million. As he fliply rapped, “I’m not a businessman:
I’m a business, man.”

His biggest lesson, both in music and money, is to
broadcast only success and ignore failures -- such as the few
singles that failed to chart (“Hovi Baby”) or the Jay-Z-branded Jeep that failed to make it into production.

The book tells us rather more about Jay-Z than his own
work, “Decoded” (Spiegel & Grau, $25), a fragmented memoir and
picture-heavy scrapbook that has been reissued with 16 pages
meant to explain his newer lyrics.

Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga reclines in the bath, holding a bottle and
spitting out beer. On another page she’s posing in that infamous
meat dress worn for the MTV Video awards. Elsewhere, she’s
trying a little half-naked yoga.

These are three of the 450 striking images in the
heavyweight “Lady Gaga x Terry Richardson” (Grand Central,
$50).

Gaga allowed photographer Richardson to follow her as she
toured, partied and recorded “Born This Way.” He shot 100,000
frames. The most telling portraits show the singer relaxed
offstage, such as the one of her lying in bed, dressed down in
glasses, with a plate of food as her only company.

Lady Gaga’s quiet night in is a far cry from the time when
rock stars used to trash hotels as a matter of course. Joe
Walsh, the crazed guitarist of the Eagles, tried to outdo the
Who and Led Zeppelin’s television-throwing antics.

The Eagles

Abetted by manager Irving Azoff, Walsh would destroy rooms
and furnishings, “often with the help of a chainsaw that Walsh
carried on tour for that very purpose,” according to the
entertaining “Eagles: Taking It to the Limit” by Ben Fong-Torres (Running Press, $30). The unauthorized bio marks the
band’s 40th anniversary with glossy photos and a brisk account
of how the best-selling group gorged on drink, drugs, groupies
and private jets before rivalries and legal spats set in.

While Trynka has no answers on whether Bowie will make
music again -- it’s been eight years since the last studio album
-- he goes beyond sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll shock value to
show exactly how the pimpled schoolboy David Jones became Ziggy
Stardust, Aladdin Sane and the Thin White Duke.

Nile Rodgers

Bowie gets called “the Picasso of rock” in “Le Freak: An
Upside Down Story of Family, Disco and Destiny” (Spiegel &
Grau, $27), an entertaining autobiography by Nile Rodgers, the
brains behind Chic. The producer, who has been playing emotional
concerts after a cancer scare, drops in anecdotes about Madonna,
Michael Jackson and more.

Fans of George Harrison, the quiet Beatle who died in 2001,
will lap up “George Harrison: Living in the Material World”
(Abrams, $40), by his second wife, Olivia. The memoir, padded
out with personal archive material, ties in with a Martin
Scorsese TV documentary.

“The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years”
(PublicAffairs, $21.99), by Greil Marcus, analyzes about 15
songs word by word. It’s likely to encourage fans to play the
tracks all over again to appreciate his insights.

“Pearl Jam Twenty” (Simon & Schuster, $40) covers the
band’s first two decades, with hundreds of unseen pictures and
quotes from interviews conducted by Cameron Crowe and others.

The masterful “Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History
of Grunge,” by Mark Yarm (Crown Archetype, $25), shows how over
five years Seattle became the birthplace of grunge, with Pearl
Jam being joined by Soundgarden, Nirvana and Alice in Chains.

Even better is “Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years
in New York That Changed Music Forever” by Will Hermes (Faber &
Faber, $30), an account of the Big Apple’s punk scene from 1973
to ‘77. One particularly jaw-dropping picture shows four
musicians playing at the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club in 1976:
John Cale, Lou Reed, Patti Smith and David Byrne. Oh, to have
been at that show.

(Mark Beech writes for Muse, the arts and leisure section
of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)